


to sleep, perchance

by otterlymagic



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Bendemption, Eventual Fluff, F/M, Force Bond (Star Wars), Happy Ending, Insomnia, Not Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker Compliant, Post-Star Wars: The Last Jedi, Rey deserved better
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-26
Updated: 2019-12-26
Packaged: 2021-02-26 02:26:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 12,174
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21975826
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/otterlymagic/pseuds/otterlymagic
Summary: Rey has insomnia and doesn’t know why. She’s not the only one. The Force isn't done with them yet.Reylo happy ending. Includes many characters and plots from the Sequel Trilogy, but is Rey and Reylo focused.
Relationships: Rey/Ben Solo | Kylo Ren
Comments: 5
Kudos: 75
Collections: Reylo Charity Anthology: Volume 1





	to sleep, perchance

**Author's Note:**

> So this was actually written for the Reylo Charity Anthology: Volume 1 all the way back at the end of 2018. I chickened out of posting it here because I was basically a fandom lurker and didn't feel adequate. Rereading it after seeing The Rise of Skywalker, though...eff it, this would have been a better ending. So here we go!

_ To die, to sleep; No more, and by a sleep to say we end; The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks; That flesh is heir to, ‘tis a consummation; Devoutly to be wish’d. To die, to sleep; To sleep, perchance to dream, aye there’s the rub; For in that sleep of death what dreams may come. _

##  ii

Fans whir, gears click together, fuel drags a thousand pistons up and down, up and down, to keep their tiny ship moving on its course through space. Altogether it’s a hum around her. If she listens carefully, there’s a sort of pattern to it, a rhythm of mechanical life. The Force only flows through living things, it is said, yet the beat of it can be heard everywhere in the universe. 

Rey’s not in the mood to ponder the Force in man-made objects right now. She’s not in the mood for anything but sleep. Every time she opens her eyes and sees the ceiling, she lets out a huff of breath and rolls over, shifting until the lumps and coils beneath her are in a tolerable position.

It’s not that the ceiling is particularly objectionable, though it doesn’t compare to the expanse of space reaching for endless miles above her head. Ceilings are oppressive. It’s nice to be out of the rain, but Rey misses sleeping under the stars. She felt safer on Jakku.

And she can’t sleep. Her time keeper has diligently tracked three hours of her restless movements, but she can’t feel even a hint of sleep on the horizon. There’s no reason for it...and yet, she can’t shake it.

Last night she tried a sleeping tonic that tasted strongly of alcohol, but that Poe swore by. It made her doze for a couple hours before lying the rest of the night, unsleeping, with a stomach ache. The night before, she’d tried yet another sleeping pill, meant to knock out someone recovering from surgery. It had given her a night of tossing and turning, sleeping 10 minutes here and 10 minutes there.

She can’t remember the last time she had a full night’s sleep. Just after Crait, maybe? A week or two of good sleep in the fleet, before it became a distant unfamiliar concept?

If she closes her eyes, the underlying pattern in the noisy machinery around her beats in time with her own heart, steady and yet too-fast. Her body says stay awake; her mind begs for sleep. She scrunches her eyes shut and orders the Force to fix this.

_ That’s not how the Force works _ , she hears. Whether it’s Master Skywalker or Captain Solo’s voice, she’s not sure.

A familiar whirring sound joins the hum around her. It slowly increases in volume until she hears the soft beeping of a droid, and a warm dome of metal nudging her hand. 

“What is it, BB-8?” she murmurs, opening her eyes.

He rolls back an inch, then forward to nudge her hand again, repeating his string of beeps.

“I’m not in distress,” she tells him. “I just can’t sleep.”

He lets out a long beep that winds down in sad resignation.

“Yeah, nothing to do for it.” Rey pats his dome and wiggles his antenna. “I’ll be fine, little buddy.”

BB-8 gives her a comforting chirp, bumps her hand again, and rolls away.

What Rey would give to be a droid and not have to sleep at all. It’s not entirely impossible, either. She’s thought of it before, frustrated by her small and fragile human body while scavenging in the giant abandoned ships. For instance, Darth Vader was famously 85% droid. Though, he kept his brain in a physical organ rather than a computer, and overall the technology in his suit suffered from being hastily made for an emergency situation. It doesn’t say if he slept or not, in any of the tales she’s heard.

Rey is about to dream of a much better droid body when she feels a pang of sadness in her gut. She puts her hand on her belly, confused, before remembering just who she’s been thinking about.

That will not do. If there’s any Force connection preparing to blossom, she shuts it down with a fierce clench of her teeth. The pang in her gut turns into something that just  _ hurts _ , but that makes sense. Everything since Crait has hurt if she thinks too much about it.

She opens her eyes, sees the ceiling again, and rolls to the other side with a sigh. 

Her timekeeper records another three hours. The ship begins to come to life, and Rey has not slept even a moment.

##  ii

Tink. Tink tink. Tink-tink tink. The sound of metal forks against metal plates is a cacophony in her ears, somehow louder than the chatter of Resistance folks around her.

Rey can’t chew her portion of protein pack for how hard her jaw clenches at every grate of metal-on-metal, so she just stares at the plate while the warm mush dissolves in her mouth. It is one step away from being tasteless and textureless anyway.

“Meditating or just asleep?” Finn’s cheery voice comes in through the chaos. He sets his plate next to hers with a clatter of metal.

“Not funny,” she mumbles around her mouth of mush.

He takes it in stride. He’s good that way, not taking rejections of his attempts at humor personally like Poe does. “Sorry,” he says, and then takes a bite of his own protein pack. “You alright, then? Not sick, are you?”

Rey shakes her head, and takes a sip of water to swallow the mush in her mouth. She’s really not hungry for this breakfast. Weird as it was, she misses the variety of food from Ahch-to. It had all been flavorful, at least. She’d mistakenly assumed all the food in the galaxy was like that, and she would never have to go back to the monotony of “food” like on Jakku. “Not sick,” she says when her mouth is clear. “Haven’t slept.”

Finn makes a sympathetic sound in his throat. “That was me while they were waiting for Rose to wake up. Sometimes nightmares too. I’ve been lucky the past few nights, but I feel you.”

Rey knows he means well. He’s her friend, her first friend, one of the few people she’d die for in this world. Normally she’d smile and appreciate the shared experience...but she can count on  _ both _ hands now the nights she hasn’t slept more than two hours, and the world is too loud and too fast and nothing is a comfort. He’s far too bright-eyed to know the misery she’s been feeling, and so his sympathy just irritates her.

It’s not his fault, though, so she just shrugs and shoves a giant bite of protein into her mouth to avoid answering with some snappy comment. 

Finn reaches out a hand and rubs her shoulder, as if he senses that it’s worse than what she says out loud. The physical contact catches her off-guard. Usually he just hugs her, which is different, because half a dozen people have hugged her in the last few weeks (more than the rest of her life combined, she thinks).

She almost flinches. It’s not bad, but she wasn’t expecting it to feel like he’s touched a raw nerve of intensity. The last time someone touched her with intent to comfort...well, she’s not going to think about  _ that _ right now. Maybe that’s what she’s been missing, though. An image suddenly pops into Rey’s head of being wrapped up in his arms like a small child, and drifting off into a pleasant sleep. 

“Do you snore?” she asks, the words popping out of her mouth without planning.

“Huh?” Finn blinks, and takes the second of surprise to swallow the bite of food he’s been chewing.

Without the context of her train of thought, obviously it sounds a bit odd, but it’s not like it’s an inappropriate question. “Do you snore,” Rey repeats.

“Oh yes he does,” says Poe, arriving on the scene with a laugh as he sits down, opposite her and next to Finn. “The whole garrison wonders how your old squad handled it. It’s like sleeping next to a dozen dogs with the flu.”

Rey grimaces. She forgot that he sleeps with the garrison. He doesn’t like to sleep alone, he told her. It’s not something they have in common - or it wasn’t until right now, apparently.

“Yeah, well, can’t help it,” Finn says with a bit of a chuckle. “Why do you ask? Someone keeping you awake with snoring? I thought you got your own bunk room.”

“Nothing important,” Rey lies. Her pleasant image of being held by someone warm and safe who could lull her into sleep is now tainted by the probable reality of lying there, thinking of smothering her sleeping partner while he emanates erratic rumbles. “I have my own room. Just can’t sleep.”

“The tonic didn’t help?” Poe asks incredulously.

“Nope.” Rey keeps it short. These are good people, her friends, but she doesn’t want to talk. Everything is loud, her brain feels overwhelmed and foggy, and she has a long list of things to do. 

She shovels the rest of her protein portion into her mouth, stuffing her cheeks. Can’t afford to waste food, even if it doesn’t taste like food. She stands up to take her plate and fork to the washbin. “I’ll see you in the general’s meeting later.”

When she walks away, she feels their gaze on her back. They probably talk about her as soon as she’s out of earshot, with well-meaning sympathy and concern. The attention would normally fill her with a warmth and a sense of belonging. Instead, she feels her brow tense, and wishes they’d give her sleep instead of concern. An irrational thought, of course, but it’s all she can manage.

##  iii

There’s a legend on Jakku that if you go two weeks without sleep, your eyes will stick open and you’ll never be able to shut them again, and you’ll see all the things that living creatures were never meant to see. That’s why everyone sleeps when the sun sets, to avoid the unspeakable terrors that inhabit the night.

Not only does that not make sense in space, where it is always night, but Rey is pretty sure that she’s not grumpy because of all the horrific things she’s seen in the night. It’s rather the opposite of terror to lie awake, unable to rest, unable to stop seeing or hearing the pure mundanity around you. And there’s no cold void above, ready to hold your mind as you drift off into unconsciousness. There’s only walls all around.

Then, when the endless night finally passes, leaving her with only a few moments of stolen sleep...then there’s the waking hours, when every meeting drags on half a lifetime, and every conversation hurts her head. They’re at war and she is one of their leaders now, whether she wants to be or not. 

General Leia is kind enough to show her how to work the caf machine. She gulps down a few mugs before someone shows her the creamer, but it doesn’t matter because it only makes her a faster kind of tired, and makes her use the toilet more often. It doesn’t give her clear thoughts. They all expect so much of her, while all she can think of is laying her head down on the nearest flat surface.

She’s moving through her days on caf and autopilot, and if it weren’t for the timekeepers all over the ship, she’d assume she’d been struggling with this for several lifetimes.

Finn asks if she wants to come meet some of his and Poe’s resistance friends, one night. Rey shakes her head, no, because she _can’t_ deal with other people right now.

She forgot to clean herself that morning, so she climbs into the fresher before heading to bed. It almost feels like sleeping to stand under the rain of lukewarm water. Each drop splashes against her and the fresher floor, one after another in a neverending cascade, and their individuality is lost in the cacophony of so many. It’s more calming than silence. Sleep is so close...and yet so far.

_ I don’t understand _ , she thinks.  _ Nothing is wrong. I should be able to sleep. This makes no sense. _

The fresher lulls her just to the edge of rest. She has no shame - if she could, she’d sleep right here in the fresher. She closes her eyes and tries, but her mind stays just on the border of sleep and will not budge beyond.

She comes out of the fresher clean but miserable. Lying on the bed, staring at the ceiling, she feels like her mind will fade into insanity before she gets a night of rest.

That’s the last straw, it seems, for suddenly there’s a flood of hot, stinging tears flowing down her cheeks. She rolls over and buries her face in the pillow, chest aching. It’s stupid, so stupid, after all she’s been through, to cry over this. She can’t even cry herself to sleep, she’s just  _ crying _ .

When she’s finally dry of tears, and still awake, it has fixed nothing and more than her chest aches. Every hurt she’s ever felt seems to be lodging in her tired bones now.

With consciousness being so much like a burden, all that’s left is meditation. She spends the next few hours sitting crosslegged like Master Skywalker taught her, drifting on the tides of the Force that fill every person in the Resistance. She feels their dreams, their hopes, their restless moments through the night. She feels the quiet watchfulness of those who are taking their guard shifts to protect the tiny Fleet. It takes half her sleepless frustration away, to lose herself in the vast lifeforce of the universe.

There is a moment of peace that pulses in her chest like a tiny ball of hope, glowing with light that has not been extinguished by these days of sleeplessness. Even if she can’t access it, she can feel that she is still  _ there _ under all these layers of exhaustion.

“It _is_ you,” she hears around her, then, with a slight metallic echo.

Like the snap of a rubber band, or the jolt when a ship drops out of hyperspace, her connection to the entire fleet narrows to a single point. Exhaustion returns like a heavy blanket over her mind.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she says aloud, angry at herself for being back here.

Reluctantly, she opens her eyes, expecting to see the Supreme Leader before her, haughty and betrayed and lost to the darkness. Instead she sees a disheveled, barely-human image, slumped over the edge of a bed or bench that she can’t see. He looked more alive after one of Snoke’s punishments than now. She stares, blankly, appreciating that at least she is not being taunted.

“You’re why I can’t sleep,” he says, each word coming out broken and raspy. “For the last  _ week _ . ”

Rey has no patience for this connection, this conflict, this mess. “It’s no less than you deserve, but I have done nothing. I have shut you out. Your sleeplessness is your guilt at work, Kylo, not anything of my doing.”

His eyes burn darkly at her choice of name. “You can’t shut me out. Not unless one of us shuts out the Force itself. All you can do is pretend I don’t exist.” His lips twist in a distorted smile. “It doesn’t matter. You can’t sleep either. Spending your nights wishing you’d ended my life instead of just leaving me humiliated, I imagine.”

The sound that comes from Rey’s throat is somewhere between a laugh and a sob. She closes her eyes and wills the connection to end.

It ends. It doesn’t feel satisfying. She is alone again, her heartbeat uncomfortably audible in her ears. 

And yet, she can’t help but think, at least she is not lying awake with a thousand sins to regret. Only a few.

Hours pass by and she does not search for peace in the Force again. It is safer to be alone. Her eyes hurt from crying all the same, her body aches, and she feels madness slowly creeping around the edges of her consciousness.

##  iv

If people notice anything wrong with Rey, they seem to think she’s worried about the war and continue their lives around her. Not that Rey knows anything of war, even _with_ a full night’s rest. 

She knows some things. There are...ships. Planets. Battalions. And enemies, of course, with strategies. She’d hoped, secretly, that their abysmally small numbers would make things easier. Luke’s actions on Crait and Amilyn Holdo’s solitary strike, however, lit a spark among planets that had yet to support Leia. Ships and people began trickling in, after years without an influx, and now they have a small army again. In every meeting Rey squints at the 3D maps and doesn’t quite know what they mean. 

Day nine without sleep comes, without any fanfare, and she can’t have slept more than ten hours altogether between all nine nights. She worries she’ll go insane. She worries that this is how you end up on the Dark Side, as every friend’s laughter or bit of small talk grates along her spine and gives her intrusive thoughts of murder.

She stops researching how to mend kyber crystals. If she had a lightsaber in hand, she’d probably accidentally cut her own head off. That is not the kind of sleep she wants.

Of course, without any new Jedi skills, it feels like she’s an imposter at every meeting of the Resistance leadership. They want her there but she feels like it’s only to have a symbol. To show that the Dark has no advantage on the Light in terms of Force users.

She just stays quiet and tries, vainly, to understand the military strategy they discuss. Eventually her mind fades to blank - not sleep, just emptiness. She’s still staring at the map on the table when she notices that everyone else is gone, and only General Leia remains.

“You need more caf,” the woman says, with a small smile.

“It doesn’t work,” Rey answers, by rote.

“Nightmares?” The question comes casually, as if whatever answer she could give would be unimportant, just more small talk. Rey’s not so exhausted that she falls for that.

“No,” she says. “I just can’t sleep. I have tried literally everything, so please don’t bother suggesting cures.” 

“Can’t sleep or won’t sleep?” Leia leans in, hands folded on the edge of the table.

Rey sits back, offended.

“I know,” Leia says slowly, “that in your dreams, you and my son are connected. Do you avoid sleep to avoid him too?”

The constant ache in her stomach flares up, so much that she can almost taste acid in her throat. She’s so tired, she wonders if this is just a hallucination. But no, the General’s piercing brown eyes are too real. “You know?” she asks.

Leia is calm, almost guarded, her voice even and smooth. “I have felt disturbances in the Force. It took me a long time to find the pattern. To figure out what it meant. I may not be a Jedi, but I’ve read a few texts and I know the possibilities. Am I wrong in my assumption, Rey?”

Rey only shakes her head. It shames her to admit it. Chewbacca knows, of course, for he was there for her entire reckless endeavor up until the bitter, lonely end. She didn’t tell anyone else and she doesn’t want to. Why, though, she has not considered until now.

“You need not be afraid of him,” Leia says, with just a touch of warmth. “I have seen what you can do, Rey. You are powerful beyond--”

“No.” Rey spits out the word before she can stop herself. This...this is why she doesn’t want them to know. All the wrong assumptions, for how could they possibly guess the truth? “I’m not afraid of him. I know my own potential. I’m not avoiding sleep because I’m afraid of dreams. It’s not dreams, it’s the Force, and I can control it now...more or less. Now that Snoke is gone.”

Leia stands, slowly, and walks around to take a seat next to Rey. She’s still calm and quiet, but less guarded, more present. Her hand is warm when she lays it over Rey’s and squeezes gently. “You’re troubled all the same. You take too much on yourself, dear child. You need not carry the weight of the entire Force on your shoulders. You are not responsible for current events.”

Each word is full of confidence and caring, so much that Rey wishes she could drown in it. She doesn’t know what it would feel like to have a mother, but surely a mother would sit by her side and hold her hand and tell her that she was  _ enough _ . Which is all she’s ever wanted and all she cannot have. She cannot make this moment into something it’s not, not even with all the longings of her soul.

Rey speaks barely more than a whisper in response. “I _am_ responsible. I...I tried to change things. And they did change, but not how I wanted. I moved too fast. I didn’t understand enough. Now I’m afraid that I ruined everything.”

There is a moment of silence after she lets the last word fall, so painful that Rey can barely breathe.

Leia’s arms, then, wrap around Rey in a close embrace. 

Rey can breathe again, halting and jagged. Everything is too much and everything hurts more than it has ever hurt before, and not only in her own heart.

“You have ruined nothing,” Leia whispers, running a hand up and down Rey’s back. “If it were ruined, we would not be here, and I would feel the oncoming darkness. That is what I felt before you. I have not felt it since you came. You are a blessing, Rey, do not doubt that.”

Leia has hugged her before, but Rey has never known what to do with it. Now she feels small, even though she is taller than this woman, and the protection surrounding her is so blindingly good that she cannot put up any defenses. “I feel it,” she says. “I feel the darkness.” Luke told her what it felt like - how could Leia not know, as his sister?

When Leia pulls back, there are tears on her cheeks but she smiles. She raises a hand to brush a fingertip down Rey’s cheek. “All of us are full of both light and dark. I am not afraid of the darkness in you, no more than I am afraid of the darkness in me. The oncoming darkness of which I speak is far colder and full of despair. Once, I thought it might consume all that I love. But it is fleeing. Not gone yet, but fleeing fast. I believe more than ever that light will prevail again. Perhaps in ways I dared not hope for before.”

Rey closes her eyes, feeling them wet and stinging. She puts a hand over her chest, as if it might calm the aching, and shakes her head. The pain is not all her own. He was right and they are still connected, regardless of if she acknowledges the evidence. 

“Sometimes we tell ourselves that we’re not afraid, because we think fear is weakness,” Leia says, and reaches out to take Rey’s hand in hers. “But courage is doing what’s right even though we are afraid. It is not letting fear, whether of the future or of what we have done in the past, choose our next path to take.”

Rey nods, slowly, and squeezes Leia’s hand back. It is a comfort, even if she is too weary to truly appreciate it. “I don’t know why I can’t sleep, I really don’t. It’s not fear or regret or anything like that.”

“I trust you.” Leia smiles and stands up. “But I wanted you to know...we all believe in you. We’re here for you. You’re not alone.”

Somehow Rey manages to meet her smile, even though those final words feel like a stab to her heart. 

Leia leaves her alone in the meeting room and Rey rests her head on the cool table, closes her eyes, and lets everything spin around her in a dizzying circle. She doesn’t want any more support or belief, she just wants everything to stop and let her rest.

Leia was right about one thing, though. The darkness isn’t growing stronger...just more desperate. Rey hopes she can last long enough to see it end. If this exhaustion doesn’t break her first.

##  v

The tenth day passes, and Rey spends the night waking and sleeping and waking again. The cycling happens so fast, she loses track of whether she’s dreaming she’s asleep, or dreaming she’s awake, or dreaming that she’s dreaming. Nothing seems real when the artificial morning comes.

On the eleventh day, Finn drags her to see a medical droid. She sits, exhausted and annoyed by the beeping of the scanner as it passes over her. Finn is worried about her sleeplessness; Rey is starting to worry about the other sensations. Her stomach has been restless, her back is sore, and when her mood swings to anger it feels unwarranted and all-consuming. She feels that anger now, as the machine analyzing her medical data whines at a pitch so high that it’s barely audible.

The rage, along with the crushing tightness in her ribs, is apparently not physical. “You are perfectly healthy,” the droid announces, with a cheerfulness that no non-sentient being should have. “Readings are within the normal range for 12 different hormone productions, as well as all neurological activity.”

Finn looks at her with a frown.

Rey shrugs. “I meditate. I told you. I’m fine. I’ve slept...a little.”

“Your condition is not fatal,” the droid pronounces. “But your concern is understandable. Please return if anything changes, or your amount of sleep drops to zero.”

Apparently, you can survive on small amounts of sleep for a very, very long time. Rey and Finn leave in silence. 

When they reach the end of the hall, where Finn will go off to join his pilot crew and Rey has yet another strategy meeting, Finn goes to hug her.

Rey puts a hand on his chest. “I really don’t want your pity,” she says. “It’s not comforting.” She hopes it’s blunt but not too blunt.

He nods and winces. “I’m just worried.”

It is not comfortable to be worried over. And all things considered, sleeplessness is far from the worst that she’s suffered. Far from the worst _ he _ has suffered, so why is he so insistent? 

Rey stares at him. Her eyes cannot focus on the details of facial features, yet she can see the hints of a mask behind his expression. He’s taken off the stormtrooper helmet, but that was only a symbol; the rest is buried down deep in him. He’s running from it, she can sense. It’s there in the way the Force moves between them, through him. He doesn’t want to be afraid. He wants to move on, be happy, play normal. How better to achieve that then to put on a brave face?

Once, Rey would have applauded that move. Before Ahch-to and the cave. Before the Finalizer. So many years spent waiting, deliberately not thinking, distracting herself with anything and everything on Jakku. She would have kept to that course if the Force had not had other plans, however, and had ripped that defense apart and laid bare the depths of pain and fear and self-loathing that she’d so-long denied. Her happiness had been a lie, however much it had hurt to admit.

Now, she keeps her hand on Finn’s chest, fingertips curling slightly into his shirt. She wants to tell him that you cannot bury the past and expect it to disappear. She wants to tell him that facing the hurt is the only way to find peace. But she is so tired, and he is so worried, about her and a dozen other things. She can feel it - how fragile his self is, how little he wants to think about it, and how it’s easier to focus on others.

She had over a decade to pretend that it was all okay. Maybe she had needed that. Maybe he does too - or at least more than a few weeks.

Rey manages a smile before she drops her hand to hang by her side. “Thanks for checking up on me,” she manages.

“Always,” Finn says, and smiles back. He thinks the smile means things are better.

Once, Rey had thought they were two sides of the same coin. But she has spent a lifetime running away, and he has only just started. It is not the same. He can care for her, but he cannot truly understand. Not yet.

_ You are not alone.  _ But she is, now.

Rey spends her twelfth sleepless night staring at the ceiling, and trying to remember how it felt to have the universe beat in rhythm with her heart. It wasn’t so long ago, yet she can barely remember the rush of energy at being seen, understood, accepted. The way her fingers had tingled, and how she had heard two heartbeats become one.

It was but a moment but it haunts her now. 

If she was any less brave, she’d bury it down and run away again. Instead, stubborn, she closes her eyes and tries to trust in the path that the Force has dragged her down. It must be leading to something. It must.

##  vi

Two weeks pass, and then a third. Rey skips out on strategy meetings now, unable to focus on the way people talk. She tells them she’s meditating on her broken kyber crystal, but even meditation is beyond her abilities. 

Every step she takes, it feels like someone else taking it while she floats outside her own body. If there’s no scheduled meal, she forgets to eat, and then once she starts, she forgets to stop. Sometimes she doesn’t get out of bed when the others do, too used to laying awake to remember that “day” is when she has to do things.

If this were some master plan of torture, it would be working. 

Paranoid, Rey asks Leia if she senses anything dark in the Force.

“You would feel it better than me,” Leia says, with a soft smile.

Rey laughs, half a sob. “Please just...I need to know what you feel.”

Leia nods, goes quiet, and closes her eyes a few moments. When she opens them, however, she shakes her head. “Nothing has changed. There is no presence like there was when Snoke was our enemy.”

So Rey is left with no answer for her sleeplessness.

She half wishes that she would stop sleeping altogether, to hasten the inevitable madness and death. Yet sometimes, randomly, she closes her eyes and catches a few minutes of slumber. Just enough that it hurts all the more upon awakening.

By the time twenty-four days have passed, she cannot find even a scrap of energy left. She is drained completely at last. 

Around her chamber, everyone rises and gets on with their day. Rey does not. She doesn’t go to breakfast. She doesn’t get dressed. She doesn’t move. She can’t remember why she ever tried before.

The bustle of morning is slightly better than the monotony of night, even if she still sees the same empty space outside her window. That emptiness defines her life now. Empty nights and empty days, and sometimes even the Force feels far away.

With nothing else to command her attention, she feels each little flicker of change in her body. The dryness in her mouth. The churn of her hungry stomach. The soreness in her hips from having laid on one side too long. Something that feels like an emotion, caught up in her ribs and gut and spine.

It is frustration, she thinks, but not her own. Her well of emotions is dry as dust now.

That inexplicable thread of the Force feels odd now, when it is the only thing left to her. Like the tiniest wire, gleaming bright and stretching across dozens of light years. Even at the end of her sanity, there it is. Unwanted and yet, somehow, comforting.

Rey wishes, in a vague jumbled unexamined mess of thought, that she didn’t have to keep shutting it down. If only it had been a comfort she could have, without worry. That moment of peace and understanding - if only she could feel it once more.

She feels the snap of anger at the back of her throat, like it’s her own.

“Shut it down.” The seething demand comes from right beside her, as if her bunk stretched out beyond the ship’s exterior and adjoined with his.

She doesn’t even open her eyes. His demand strikes right at the part of her that has never willingly followed orders. “No.”

He doesn’t answer, but she can feel his presence. It is like lying beside a writhing snake in a cage, furious at being contained but knowing that it is in no position to lash out.

There is a long moment of silence. Rey regrets not shutting their bond down again, for this is not the comfort that she had been idly remembering. And she is tired, even without remembering her failed gamble.

It is too much to expect silence from him, apparently. His voice rumbles out, still tinged with anger, though the heat has quickly gone dull. “They left me behind. Are you happy?”

Of all the things Rey expected to hear, that was not one of them. Stunned out of her dead exhaustion, she blinks and rolls over. In an absent-minded defense, she brings her knees partway to her chest, half a fetal position. She looks out to find that there’s barely two feet between them - two feet plus an unknown quantity of lightyears.

He’d been disheveled the last time; now he looks almost undead. His lips are cracked and dry, his skin looks like wax paper, and his eyes have sunken into wells of darkness. All the life and potential beauty that she’d once seen in his face, has been drained. She wonders how he can even sit upright, cross-legged, on what she thinks might be sand? She can’t really see his surroundings.

Once the shock has settled, though, confusion remains. “Who left you behind?” she asks.

His lips twist, his whole face going even more sour. “Those who once called me Supreme Leader, of course. Has the news not spread? Are you not celebrating your success?”

Rey frowns, the words only barely processing and at a snail’s pace. “I...don’t understand. We have won no victories, you are still undefeated in the galaxy. What success?”

“Oh, the First Order is undefeated, yes. Though your machinations will backfire, if you think that Hux taking high command will give you any advantage in future confrontations. At least I had limits. He has none.”

Rey can’t help but snort. “Machinations?”

His eyes flash with anger and his stance stiffens. “Don’t lie to me. This sleepless torment? It worked. Like it worked before. Like  _ you _ knew it would work, because you were in my head, and you  _ saw _ how Snoke tormented me so long ago. You knew I would be driven to incompetence such as the likes of Hux would not tolerate.”

Rey would laugh at the inaccuracy, if the accusation was not so far beyond her level of patience. She has the urge to shut down their connection out of irritation alone. Instead she snaps back, “Don’t be an idiot. _ I _ can’t sleep, so  _ you _ can’t sleep either, that is all. I can’t even control our connection, beyond shutting you out of my head. And why would I torment you? I’m not Snoke. You’re an idiot or mad or both.”

She expects to be met with anger. Instead, what flashes across his face is more like betrayal. She feels it, too, for she knows that the hurt suddenly gnarling up in her belly is not her own.

Rey never wanted to see him, never wanted to feel him, never wanted to be this close. Not anymore. It could have been something wonderful they shared, but right now it feels like a cruel reminder of lost hope. “What?” she snaps. “I have done  _ nothing _ to you, why do you look at me like that?”

He drops his head, with a deadpan laugh that grates on her ears. “It wasn’t planned. You have, yet again, destroyed everything...on accident. And now I have nothing but my grandfather’s homeworld and a crushed saber and you, oblivious you, like an everlasting curse on every endeavor I take.”

Rey frowns. “You’re on Tatooine?”

“Oh  _ that’s _ what you latch onto,” he says, in the tone of a petulant child. “Shut it down. I don’t want this. I don’t want you.”

If he had sounded more convincing, she might have. It is not good to lie sleepless and bathe in self-loathing and regret. He sounds more miserable than hateful, however, and Rey is tired of suffering in an empty room.

She sits upright and mirrors his position, stubbornly setting her jaw in a line. “If you want to be alone, then  _ you _ shut it down. Don’t pretend that you can’t. Snoke doesn’t control this anymore. It has grown beyond him, as I hoped  _ you _ could.”

Weeks ago, when Chewie had asked her what had happened, Rey had said that her mission had failed and that they must be enemies now. At the time, it had seemed unfortunate but true.

His eyes flick up to meet hers now, though, and it is not so true, however still unfortunate. An enemy can only be an enemy from a distance, after all. As much as the chasm sometimes widens between them, the Force keeps closing the gap. Requiring them to be something...less easy to put into words.

“I am nothing now,” he says, in a voice so low it can barely be heard. His eyes do not blink as they stare into hers. “I have nothing, I am worth nothing, and I am remembered only with anger. If it were not for you, I might sleep and be taken back into the Force for good. Soon to be forgotten entirely. Instead, I linger in torment, and you cannot even grant me the comfort of having  _ meant _ to be the cause of it.”

Rey closes her eyes, and sleeplessness is such a weight now that she feels crushed. She is so  _ weary _ , mind and body and soul. Yet she finds a voice, low and empty. “You would not be forgotten. It wasn’t a trivial matter, you know, that sent me to the Finalizer. I was trying to save us both so that we wouldn’t have to be alone against the world. Just because I couldn’t accept your offer of alliance…” 

She opens her eyes again, and stares down at her lap, lips tautly in a grimace to hold back the pain that washes over her, now that she says it out loud. “Even if this bond died the very next second, I’ll always remember it. It’s one of the few experiences of my life worth remembering, really. Other than forcing myself to believe a lie for fourteen years.”

He doesn’t answer, and she thinks that maybe they’ve finally come to a standstill. There is no anger anymore. No stress, no distrust, no raw hurt wrenching at their hearts. There is weariness and sadness, but it is no longer fraught with tension. Rather, in its place is a quiet acceptance of what is now in the past.

It feels like an hour that they sit silently across from each other, but after so many days without sleep, Rey does not trust her sense of the passage of time.

“You succeeded,” he finally says.

She opens her eyes, swallows hard, and frowns up at him.

“You succeeded, you didn’t just try,” he repeats, slowly. “We’re not alone against the world.”

Rey feels a stinging at the back of her eyes. “It feels like it. It feels like a conflict that will never end, and that’s  _ not _ just the lack of sleep talking.”

In what looks to be impulse without thought, he reaches out his hand towards her, palm upwards. “Then don’t feel. We’re too tired for it anyway.”

It’s another offer. She stares, bewildered, and for a moment cannot make a move. The first one had been for comfort, the second one had been a proposal, but this? She looks up at his eyes, back at his proffered hand, and then at his eyes again. All she sees is a final request for reconciliation, with no thought of what the future may hold.

Slowly, she rests her palm on top of his. There is only now, there is only here, and he’s right, they’re too tired for anything else.

The Force pulses through Rey like a wave on the ocean, when their fingers touch. He closes his eyes, so does she, and they let their clasped hands rest in the gap between their knees.

“We’re not alone,” Rey whispers.

The unspeakable need that has eaten half her sanity is fulfilled now, so unexpectedly that it is all she can focus on. Their hearts beat in time, and Rey is present for each beat, each second, each breath. The connection between them still gleams bright like a wire, holding her in place so she cannot drift away.

She is mindful of all this, and doesn’t notice when the tightness leaves her ribcage, followed by the soreness from her limbs.

She doesn’t remember if their hands unclasp or not, before sleep finally wraps her in a long-awaited embrace. All she knows is rest, at last.

##  vii

Pleasant oblivion is slowly broken at last by urgent, worried beeping, and the feel of metal bumping against her hand. Rey blinks, blurry-visioned, mouth sticky and pillow damp with drool beneath her head. She doesn’t remember lying down on her pillow.

BB-8 keeps babbling about two days, it’s been two days, she needs to see a medic.

Rey groans, pulling herself up to sit on the edge of the bed, and rubs the dried drool off her chin. “Huh?”

The little droid repeats himself, even louder, as he rocks in a nervous pattern at her feet.

“I’ve been asleep for two days?”

Affirmative beeps.

She swallows, and then chuckles, reaching out to pat his dome. “It’s alright. I hadn’t slept in 3 weeks. It’s alright, I promise, little buddy.”

BB-8 lets out a low whining sound, leaning into her touch.

Rey smiles, an actual smile that doesn’t hurt her face to make. “I feel better. Not worse. Just hungry. Sleep is good.” She yawns, and honestly, it’s a bit surreal to feel this real again.

Seemingly satisfied, though still beeping a low stream of facts about how Finn and Poe and the General have been worried for her, the droid rolls away and leaves her alone.

Rey stretches, back popping and muscles unstiffening. She’s still tired - one night’s sleep can’t make up for a couple dozen missed ones - but the aching feeling has fled her bones, and consciousness no longer feels like being stuck in a nightmarish trance. When she lets out a long breath, she can feel the smile still lingering on her lips.

In the fresher, as the warm water surrounds her, she feels the pulse of the Force stronger than ever. It is...happy. If it can have an opinion. It’s a Living Force, after all.

“You could have just told me,” she mumbles to the universe. “Sleep deprivation was a bit harsh.” There’s no answer, just a steady pulse. The Force cannot be guilted.

Now that she’s had a long rest, though, it’s not hard to see what was holding her back. She’d responded to failure with hurt, withdrawal, and - most detrimentally - unconscious obsession on all the ways she’d let things go wrong. After all she’d been told about letting go and accepting the past for what it was, she hadn’t actually  _ done _ that. Not at all.

It’s easy, she realizes, to discover a bad habit and then not notice when you fall into it again. It’s easy to lie to yourself.

Rey stands in front of the mirror wrapped in a towel and brushes the tangles from her hair. There’s dark circles under her eyes, still, but a light behind her them again. It’s determination - but she hopes it’s a little wisdom, too.

The last weeks had been spent trying to bury her pain, which made it hurt all the more. Only when she finally accepted her pain for what it was did she find relief and rest. The Force had been fierce in its lesson, but the reward had been worth it. And the lesson was not only for her, but for the one who’d held her hand and asked for nothing but peace.

She blinks and stares at her reflection. Had he realized the lesson, she wonders. Had he rested too? Was he safe, abandoned on Tatooine, despairing of life? The Force tells her he is alive, at least. No more, but no less.

Rey tugs her hair back into a low ponytail and pulls on her shirt and vest. This uncertainty is something she must accept, just as she accepts failure.

Everything is more complicated than she had imagined. She remembers how deep the hurt had gone, both the first time they had touched hands and then when he thought she was torturing him with sleeplessness. There had been no secrets between them; she had felt his pain as if it was her own. So she  _ knows _ , more than most humans ever know. 

She knows he does not let go of pain the way she does. Pain has been a long-time companion to him, and the source of his purpose. To let it go would require him finding a new self completely, while she had merely uncovered a self that had been long hidden.

So she cannot rush this. Just like she cannot rush Finn into admitting the pain within him and the loss he has suffered. There are so many people that she must be patient for. For someone so experienced in waiting, she should be better at this. 

Rey heads to breakfast, smile faded into a serious expression. The chatter of personnel and clatter of metal dishware doesn’t bother her now. Nor does the tasteless grainy lump of protein that is her portion. She devours it in a few bites, cheeks stuffed.

She is awake enough to get to work again, and life should be restarting, with all the daily tasks that she has forgotten over the past weeks. Yet she sits, lost in thought, for far too long. The culprit is no longer sleeplessness, but the fact that she cannot stop thinking of her lost soul across the galaxy.

It is too long before she pulls herself from the table and to a strategy meeting. Leia smiles to see her, but says nothing - no one else says a word, if the General does not.

The meeting is all facts over which she has no control, however, and her thoughts keep drifting.

Shipping herself to the Finalizer had been a mistake, of course. Chewie probably could have told her that, but she knows he’s used to impatient captains. So he’d let her go. It had seemed right, so right. When they had been one, their pains raw and mingling, she had felt hope. It had been a hope that drowned out Rey’s fear; now, she realizes, it had only  _ dulled _ his. And fear, when forced to make decisions, makes desperate ones. Wrong ones.

This is the story of her failure and it does not wrack her with guilt now. She tells herself that it is not the end of all things. It is not going to be her lasting legacy.

Somewhere in the galaxy, probably still on Tatooine, there is a person who is tired of darkness but still afraid of the light. Rey cannot destroy that fear, for it is more deep-set than hers, and such fears cannot be unraveled from the outside. This is the wisdom she can learn from her failure, now that she accepts it. 

Her legacy will not be of a savior who steps in, offers a hand, and raises the lost from darkness to light. She is, instead, a beacon. She will hope, and fight, and let light and warmth and care fill the world around her. If she is strong enough, perhaps it will pierce the veil of fear that lies over the galaxy, and inspire a hope so strong that it can defeat all in its path.

She feels a twinge of jealousy in her gut, as the strategy meeting goes on about her, without her attention. It is not her own jealousy, yet this fact no longer distresses her. 

_ You are not alone _ , she thinks. The emotion writhes and fades away, though not completely out of reach.  _ One day, you’ll feel the hope too _ _ , _ she continues, even if he is no longer paying enough attention to hear it.  _ None of us are alone _ _.  _

Afterwards, Poe gives her a funny look as they walk out of the meeting room.

“What?” she asks him, wondering if he’s still worried and BB-8 didn’t explain that she was better now.

“You barely said anything,” he says.

She opens her mouth to say something in self-defense, but stops when she sees him grin at her.

“You barely said anything,” he says, “but even the General stopped to listen when you did. Whatever you dreamed about while you were asleep for those two days, it turned you into a true leader. How the Jedi were always supposed to be.”

Rey only blinks, mouth still half open.

Poe laughs and pats her on the back. “Don’t tell the General, but I’m glad _you_ came back and not her brother. Can’t wait to see you fight off the Dark Side with a lightsaber one day. I bet one day soon, holovids of that are going to spread across the galaxy…”

He walks away, leaving her to frown, pout, and scrunch up her face before accepting his odd compliment. It’s a Poe kind of compliment, after all, and they are people on two very different wavelengths. 

She doesn’t know enough about the old Jedi Order to know if what he says is true. But maybe that’s for the best. If there’s one thing Rey will not do, it is repeat the mistakes that destroyed an entire Republic. The Jedi are her, she is the last Jedi, and she is also the first Jedi. From now on, Jedi means nothing more than spreading hope and love to a galaxy that so desperately needs it.

With that in mind, that night, she pulls her broken kyber crystal out from beneath her bed and looks over it with new determination. A lightsaber would be a powerful representation of her purpose, and it’s worth having a weapon other than inner strength when darkness strikes back.

She lets herself meditate deeply, until the kyber crystal pieces feel hot in her hands, and she feels like she might know how to heal them.

She feels another presence, too, though she cannot see him or sense anything around him.

Weariness builds behind her eyes, at last, and makes her yawn. Rey climbs into bed, and it feels so much softer now, so much more welcoming.  _ Sleep with me _ , she thinks, reaching out across half the galaxy instead of shutting it out.

There is no answer, but sleep comes to her, deep and peaceful, and she will never take it for granted again.

##  viii

As Supreme Leader of the First Order, Hux is ruthless and bold...but not terribly efficient nor original, aside from a brilliant moment here and there. He’s young and he dismisses the counsel of his elders. Or so the Resistance assumes from the other side of the War.

Leia is old and tired, but she is a general who has been at war longer than Hux has been alive, and has heard countless stories from people fighting before she herself was born. In the long run, she knows how to defeat him.

Winning is no less harsh than losing, however.

As the weeks go by, Rey watches in silent horror as thousands fall. Some in person, on planets, in a hail of laser fire and explosions. Blood stains the sands, and sometimes she sees a stray body part left behind. She hears screams and she can never tell which side they’re coming from. She does what she’s supposed to do, and stands as a leader and beacon - but even victory doesn’t feel triumphant.

It’s worse when she sees vast warships explode, and knows that the cold emptiness of space is swallowing ten thousand screams.

When Finn and Rose lead their protest on behalf of Stormtroopers and conscripted soldiers among the First Order, Leia is hesitant but Rey agrees in a second.

“It’s not their fault that they were caught up in this,” Rose says with fierce valiance.

“And even if it was, they should have a chance to turn around,” Finn adds, with fire in his eyes.

It is no smiling matter, but Rey nods, grateful that she’s not the only one looking for better answers than death.

From that day forward, the war is different. There is still death, too much death, but the word spreads and soon come refugees. Some civilians, some soldiers, but all from the First Order and their long-occupied territories. Wounded, tortured, confused, hesitant. 

Not overnight, but so fast that it’s awe-inspiring, Rey watches Finn rise to leadership. She watches men and women look to him with hope, and watches him give them confidence and wisdom and purpose again. She watches Rose inspire them all to do what they can, with whatever they have, because now they are part of the Light and they all matter.

It is hard to see the Resistance base as an effective military outpost, with how little uniformity there is. And yet, they are the ones winning. Even better, they are saving lives and planets.

Rey finishes rebuilding her lightsaber at last, and instead of a color it is clear like sunlight on a summer day, so bright that it is almost blinding to look upon. She attaches it to the end of her staff and holds it aloft, and there are cheers from thousands when she does. Hope is spreading; the spark has become a raging fire.

It is everything she could have hoped for.

Yet when it all goes quiet, when the Force is the loudest thing around her, Rey still feels a distant conflict. She feels pain and exhaustion and thirst, sometimes, when they are not her own. No words make it through the bond between them, but they are still connected. The pain worries her. Wherever he is, presumably still alone in the world, she cannot help but reach out her thoughts.

_ You can always come back _ , she thinks. It never seems like he hears her. She is a beacon to so many, and yet the one soul she cares for the most is still beyond her reach.

Every night, as sleep takes her, she tells herself to let go. To accept this half-loneliness, to be grateful he is not dead or hating her, and to find peace within herself. The peace is better than all her life up until now...and yet she knows it can be better, and there is always a longing in her heart that follows her to sleep and through dreams and to waking again.

Three weeks pass, and one night when she goes to sleep, she does not feel conflict. The connection burns soft and strong, with a determination she has never felt before. Not rage, not obsession, but something both quieter and deeper.

Rey does not know whether to be glad or terrified. “Ben?” she whispers into the night, a word that has not entered her mind for months.

There is only stillness. Something has changed.

She tries to look into the night, but sees nothing. Brow furrowed, worry tight in her throat, she rolls toward the wall and tugs the blanket up over her shoulders.

Just as she thinks sleep might evade her for a while, she feels a gentle brush of fingers against her own.  _ Sleep _ , she feels rather than hears.

It is a great leap of faith, to hope that whatever has changed is for the better, with no knowledge one way or the other. It is a leap that Rey takes, once more, and hopes that this time it is not in vain.

She lets go and closes her eyes. She sleeps, and the touch of his fingertips is enough to keep the longing from her dreams.

##  ix

The First Order loses the Outer Rim completely, thanks to Finn and Rose and some choice holovid speeches that spread through the hypernet like wildfire. They run back toward the Core and yet they do not give up. Hux has the power to destroy cities, even if they have taken away his ability to destroy worlds, and he seems ready to go down in fearsome glory rather than surrender.

So the Resistance follows, and Leia tries to be one step ahead, to warn and raise defenses on whatever planet seems most vulnerable.

Rey has seen over a dozen worlds now, all different from Jakku, and yet she stops and her jaw drops when the ramp lowers and she first catches glimpse of Naboo.

“Beautiful, isn’t it?” Leia says beside her, with a hint of melancholy. “If things had been different, I might have grown up here.”

“It’s so...green,” Rey blurts out, because there are no words in her vocabulary for all that she sees. She recognizes water, trees, flowers, architecture - in theory, at least. She has words for at least half the colors she sees. But she truly does not have the words to describe the vibrancy, the harmony, that she sees in the beauty before her eyes.

It makes her feel inadequate, when she thinks of how the Resistance looks to her as a leader. They are a vast group of people from hundreds of worlds and cultures and peoples...and she is so inexperienced that the sight of a new planet can bring her to a wordless halt. They are all connected by a shared purpose, and a shared unity through the Force, and yet she has  _ so _ much to learn about them all.

One day soon, she hopes, the galaxy will be united under a group of leaders at peace. Then she will be joined by others, and she will not feel the weight of being the last-first Jedi that they all look towards.

They meet with the Queen of Naboo and her war advisers, tour some planetary defenses, and then Leia departs for some time alone at a shrine to one of the first Resistance leaders from back when it was just the Republic, not a resistance at all. She asks to be alone there and Rey asks Poe if he knows why, but he only shrugs and has no answer.

Without anything else to do, Rey walks the streets of the city of Theed. The air is humid here, and heavy on her skin. The sun burns on the back of her neck until sweat drips down her spine, but she doesn’t mind. It’s always nice to be planetside after spending so long in the never-changing atmosphere of a spaceship. She breathes deeply of all the strange fragrances, flowers and food and water and life.

Even with the threat of war coming toward this planet, the Naboo people resolutely keep to their routines. Carts of food sizzle with roasting meat, while their owners cry out to passers-by to stop if they are hungry. Traders haggle over wares, shop-keepers bustle around to keep everything clean and appealing, and children dance around the fountains and chase the brilliant multi-colored birds flying all about.

Rey wonders what that’s like, to see only the world in front of you, and not the galaxy above - only a year ago, she thought primarily of survival, but that is like a lifetime ago and she cannot remember how it feels.

Sometimes, it even seems like more than one lifetime. There is something ancient in her soul, she thinks, though there is no Jedi Master yet to confirm it. She doesn’t mind not knowing - having too much knowledge of destiny and legacies, she thinks, is distracting.

One moment she is simply a person, absorbing all the life in the Theed streets. The next, her radio explodes with static and panic and,  _ “An unregistered ship just flew past all our defenses and is heading straight for the Palace. We can’t seem to lock on!” _

There is no time to think. Adrenaline floods to her limbs and Rey runs in the direction the docks where Chewie and the Millennium Falcon await. 

If this is an assassin ship with some sort of cloak, she hopes the Force will guide her into bringing it down. But she is not fast enough and does not get that far.

There is a rush of air above her, the roar of engines, and a ship speeds just over her head. The heat of it almost blows Rey off her feet. With no other course of action at hand, she lights her saberstaff and grounds herself to the pavement. 

In what is almost a crash, a strange single-occupant ship lands roughly in the square ahead of her, crushing a fountain and a flower cart beneath it. The people of Naboo scream and scatter, grabbing the children as they go.

Rey glances around, only to see that all the Naboo forces have headed to the Palace and there is no one. No one but her. Her heart pounds and she is confused, because this does not feel like the First Order they’ve been fighting.

The ship is an odd mismatch of parts, all different colors and metals, arranged in a shape somewhere between a teardrop and a moon. Correllian, Rey thinks, but made from scrap. It’s amazing that it flew at all. 

She walks forward, saberstaff in hand, trying to sense any trap that might be about to go off.

The top of the ship opens, and out come two hands, raised high in the universal sign of weaponlessness. Bare hands, she notes, and frowns further.

“Rey?” comes a voice from within the ship. “It is you, isn’t it?”

Rey blinks. Her mouth opens in shock before snapping shut, a wave of relief and anger flooding her all at once. This...this is beyond belief. 

A shaggy head rises from the ship, followed by a lanky figure in linen rags, half a lightsaber hilt at his side.

“You,” she snaps, her free hand clenched into a fist.

Awkwardly, he hops down from the ship to stand just a few yards away from her. There’s caution in his eyes but something that’s almost like a smile on his face as he says, “Sorry for the panic.”

Rey’s head buzzes with the heat of her outrage, and she slams the base of her saberstaff on the ground. “The entire  _ planet _ is prepared for war now, and you’re saying sorry?”

Hands upright, palms out, Ben Solo moves slowly toward her. “Is there anything else to say, when you have done wrong? I wasn’t sure I’d get through if I sent a message first. I am sorry.”

Rey stares, anger still pulsing at the rate of adrenaline in her blood. It is  _ horrifically _ reckless to just fly a tiny ship onto a planet full of a million people who would kill you on sight, or run in terror. And it is not something that the former Supreme Leader would have done three weeks ago, when he was gaunt and dark-eyed and sleepless. Something changed.

There is a small leap in her heart when she sees that he is well. Not just alive, but well. His skin is sunburnt and stands in stark contrast to his dingy tunic, and his hair hasn’t been washed in several days at least. But it is a good change that she sees, and feels, from him. There's a freedom in his expression that's like cool water on a summer's day.

“I am sorry,” he repeats again, the almost-smile fading into something more serious. “For all of it. Today is only a start.”

He is a mess, so much so that she doesn’t know how he can speak so simply. “You are an idiot, Ben,” Rey says through gritted teeth. Yet she turns off her saber and slings it over her back.

He makes a low sound in his throat. “You kept saying that it wasn’t too late to be something else.”

“I thought you weren’t listening,” she says.

This is the moment she was hoping for, but nothing like how she imagined and so she doesn’t know what to do. The connection between them is like a magnet now that there are no more lightyears between them, only a few steps. It is oddly difficult to just stand her ground.

She waits for the Resistance, or the Royal Police, to arrive on the scene. There is nothing, though, only an abandoned square.

There’s a moment of silence, and then behind him, the makeshift ship hisses and smokes and whines all the way to an abrupt end.

Ben laughs at that, dry but not harsh. “Good thing it didn’t do that 10 minutes ago, or I’d have crashed into the Palace.”

Rey purses her lips and glares. “Did you  _ make _ that piece of junk, or steal it?”

He manages to look offended. “I’m not a thief. It was my payment for working a junk yard on Tatooine, all those parts. If I’d had more time, it would have been a fully functional ship, no matter how it looks.”

“You...worked a junk yard…” It is Rey’s turn to laugh, and really, what is she supposed to do now? With all of this? It feels more like one of her sleep-deprived dreams than reality at all.

He lets out a long sigh and shrugs his broad shoulders. “I didn’t have a choice. I had nothing. But I wasn’t planning on dying on Tatooine...not by that time, anyway.”

Rey tips her head up so that she can fully meet his gaze, her own narrowed and searching. The adrenaline is fading, the anger with it, and now she has only a suspicion that this isn’t real. “You built a ship from scraps in the middle of a desert so that you could come see me...why?”

He frowns, then. “When everything else was stripped away...when I had nothing, was nothing...you were there. Death would have been an escape from emptiness, if I’d been truly empty, but you were always there. Like a grain of sand, distracting from all other possibilities.”

Rey feels her nose twitch. “How flattering.”

Ben grimaces, though he takes a step closer. “Obi Wan did tell me that I had a talent for butchering language at all the wrong times.”

“Who?” Rey blinks again.

“My namesake.” His mouth twitches, with the hint of a smile. “A long-dead Jedi Master. I found his old hut on Tatooine and he appeared to me there, once I was no longer thinking of death. Among other things, he told me that if I planned on being a hermit in some sort of homage to my namesake, he would haunt me until the end of my days. And that I needed to fulfill my promise and actually finish what my grandfather started...finish the path of reconciliation.”

There’s a look of hope in his eyes then, and Rey has to steel her jaw to keep from smiling before she’s really ready to smile. “We could have talked about all that, you know,” she says, deliberately. “Instead of you just...ignoring me across the galaxy.”

“No,” Ben says firmly. “I had to find my own way. Just like you did. It was only fair...which is a concept that I am trying to learn.”

She has no answer for that. It would be easy, Rey thinks, to see in front of her only a weary man broken by utter defeat. To see this moment, this foolish act of vulnerability, as nothing but desperation. Maybe for someone else it would be. For Ben, who was once her lost soul, she knows that only healing could have brought him back. Maybe just the start of healing, but a start nonetheless.

“You’re still angry,” Ben says, after she is quiet for a few seconds.

“I’m not angry,” she says, and releases her smile this time.

He looks unsure, his confidence flickering.

Rey holds out her hand and says it again. “I’m not angry  _ now _ .”

A flicker of relief crosses his face, touched with pain even as he smiles. He reaches out his hand to hers, as always - but this time, instead of their fingers brushing together, he wraps both of his hands gently around hers. “I’m not angry either, anymore.”

Rey feels her pulse rising again, fluttering in her chest, as she brings her other hand to lay over his. “Good,” she says, and then can’t hold back a slight laugh. “That’s...not what I was expecting you to say.”

He leans in, pressing his forehead to hers, and she feels their hearts skip a beat together. It is that moment again, where the world disappears and there is only this - a togetherness, an un-loneliness, too strong for words. She wonders if time might stop, if she asked it to, before the Resistance finally realizes that there is no attack and appear on the scene to interrupt them.

Still, she does not move away. This is a place she could call home. She wonders if he could too, if they keep following this current path.

“I find that we get along better when I don’t talk,” he finally mumbles.

Rey chokes on her own laughter then, the sound bursting out of her with such relief that it hurts, like the last ache of a healing wound before all is well again. “Ben, you’re going to have to do a lot of talking very, very soon. I don’t know if you noticed, but you’re on Naboo and the entire Resistance is here. If you really want to walk the path of reconciliation...it’s not my forgiveness you need. You have that. It’s everyone else’s you need.”

“Do I?” He blinks, surprised. “Have your forgiveness?”

She lets out a long breath and smiles, brushing the tip of her nose against his. “Do you think I’d be here if you didn’t?”

He flushes then, his sunburnt skin going redder. “No, I suppose not…”

From far in the distance, Rey hears the sound of running footsteps, and Poe’s voice echoing off cobblestones. She can’t make out the words, but they’re close. Seconds away. When they arrive, then there will be righteous anger, suspicion, pain, bringing tension back to a moment that is so blessedly free of it. And after all the death and devastation he has caused, Rey knows that hoping for a happy ending does not guarantee one.

At least this moment is mended. There is a joy in her heart that she cannot justify or even explain. No matter what happens next, that joy is hers to keep.

She leans up and kisses Ben with all the heat of the sun.

It is not the will of the Force. All that the Force required was that they stand together. It is Rey, and Rey alone, who reaches up on her tiptoes and closes the final gap. 

He leans into her kiss and cradles the back of her skull in his hand, broad fingers teasing through the roots of her hair. Rey feels more than hears a desperate sound in his throat, as if he doesn’t care which one of them is consumed, but the desire for consumption is  _ there _ . She feels their souls as one, pulsing with the rhythm of the universe itself. Just for this moment, everything is in harmony and everything is good. After a lifetime of deprivation, Rey is not so greedy as to demand more than that.

When she breaks away, there is a new life in his eyes and the soul they share finally feels whole. She is ready for whatever is to come. 

##  the end


End file.
